Hi Fulvio,
> Does this mean that, when importing from an external application,
> either a task with start/end date and an event will be imported in
> the same way (calendar-stamped note)? And no star will be stamped?
>
> If so, I think important semantic information is being lost!
There is a loss of semantic information (at least in terms of what we
display), at least for now. RFC2445 allows for a wide array of semantic
data about tasks to be stuck in a VTODO, different subsets of which are
handled by clients, and like various other features in RFC2445, there
are a lot of fields that are rarely if ever used by end-users.
At the moment, Chandler doesn't offer much in the way of semantics
around due date or start time for tasks. I don't think anyone's
philosophically opposed to having such things, if there are features
people use and miss, but they aren't what we've got working now.
Today, if a Chandler user creates a starred event, it's hard to tell
whether someone else looking at that information would want to see it on
their task list, or on their calendar. Since iCalendar doesn't support
the concept of having an item coexist as an event and task, we have to
disappoint some use case.
> When using other applications, an Event is usually short-living and
> hard-scheduled (1-2 hours in which you must be in a place), and a
> Task is something that happens in background, with a start date and a
> due date, across a time span of several days.
>
> I think that importing some 15-day-long tasks as calendar-stamped
> items would create lots of unnecessary lozenges in the calendar view,
> making it unusable.
Heh, it's funny. Several of my friends (not a representative
sample, of course) who use non-Chandler calendars gave up on task lists
within weeks after trying them out. They all switched to just putting
their tasks as long all-day events, because they found they really only
wanted to look at one screen, and the calendar was it for them.
Anyway, the point is everyone's going to use Calendar/Tasks differently,
some actually like having lots of long-term lozenges. For some people,
having task list items appear on a calendar is a selling point, for
others, it's not.
As I mentioned in a different message, I don't think we need to lose
data when round-tripping with other applications, but we do have a
dilemma as to how to export event+starred items.
Personally, I'm more worried about people being confused that something
they created in their Chandler calendar disappears from their Lightning
calendar, I'm less worried about people finding something disappearing
from their Lightning task list. But I don't really know.
Sincerely,
Jeffrey